Systems for storing data in relational structures are known in the art. Such systems are disclosed in the following: E. F. Codd, The Relational Model for Database Management, Version 2, Addison Wesley, May 2000; ISO/IEC standards documents 9075(1-4, 9-11, 13, 14); K. Arnold, J. Gosling, D. Holmes, The Java Programming Language, 5th ed., Prentice Hall, March 2012; L. Andersen, JDBC 4.0 Specification, Sun Microsystems, November 2006. Each of these publications is hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety. Temporal database management is also known in the art, as discussed in C. J. Date, Temporal data and the Relational Model, Morgan Kaufman Publishers, December 2002, which is hereby incorporated by reference. While such systems may be suited to storing the value of data sets at a given point in time, these systems fail to provide for efficient storage and querying of data provenance information, or for doing so in a distributed environment. The presently disclosed invention addresses such limitations by providing a system and method for efficiently storing and querying data provenance information, as well as being highly distributable.